This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Henry Harris" scientist – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(May 2017) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Sir Henry HarrisFRS FAA (28 January 1925 – 31 October 2014)^[2][3] was an Australian professor of medicine at theUniversity of Oxford who led pioneering work on cancer andhuman genetics in the 2000s.

Harris was born in 1925 to a Jewish family in theSoviet Union. In 1929, his family emigrated to Australia.^[2] Harris studied atSydney Boys High School from 1937 to 1941.^[4] In 1941, he first readmodern languages, but was subsequently attracted to medicine through his literary interests. He studied medicine at theRoyal Prince Alfred Hospital and began a career in medical research rather than in clinical practice.

In the early 1950s, Harris moved to England to study at theSir William Dunn School of Pathology inOxford underHoward Florey. He completed hisDPhil in 1954 and settled down to a career of academic research. In 1960, he was appointed the head of the new department ofcell biology at theJohn Innes Institute, and, in 1964, he succeeded Florey as head of the Dunn School. In 1979, he was appointed as Oxford'sRegius Professor of Medicine, succeedingRichard Doll.

Harris's research interests were primarily focused on cancer cells and their differences from normal cells. He later studied the possibility of genetic modification of human cell lines with the material of other species to increase the range of genetic markers. Harris and his colleagues developed some of the basic techniques for investigating and measuring genes along the humanchromosome.

In 1965, he reported his observation that most nuclearRNA was non-coding, a view that was not widely accepted until years later.^[5] In 1969, Harris showed that when malignant cancer cells were fused with normalfibroblasts, the resulting hybrids were not malignant, thus demonstrating the existence of genes that could suppress malignancy. Work on thesetumour suppressor genes has become a worldwide industry.^{[citation needed]}

In 1983, Harris was elected to theAustralian Academy of Science as a Corresponding Fellow. In 1993, he was knighted.^[2]

Much of Harris's work has been supported byCancer Research UK (formerly the Cancer Research Campaign).^{[citation needed]}

He died on 31 October 2014, aged 89.

• Harris, Henry (1970).Cell Fusion. Oxford: Clarendon Press.ISBN 978-0-19-857344-9.
• Harris, Henry (1968).Nucleus and Cytoplasm. Oxford: Clarendon Press.ISBN 978-0-19-854125-7.
• Harris, Henry (1979).Scientific Models and Man. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press and Oxford University Press.ISBN 978-0-19-857168-1.
• Harris, Henry (1987).The Balance of Improbabilities: A Scientific Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press.ISBN 978-0-19-858217-5.
• Harris, Henry (1993).Hippolyte's Club Foot: The Medical Roots of Realism in Modern European Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press.ISBN 978-0-19-951362-8. (TheRomanes Lecture for 1993).
• Harris, Henry (1995).The Cells of the Body: A History of Somatic Cell Genetics. Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.ISBN 978-0-87969-533-0.
• Harris, Henry (2000).The Birth of the Cell. Yale University Press.ISBN 978-0-300-08295-1.
• Harris, Henry (2002).Things Come to Life: Spontaneous Generation Revisited. Oxford University Press.ISBN 978-0-19-851538-8.
• Harris, Henry (2006).Remnants of a Quiet Life. Twin Serpents Limited.ISBN 978-1-905524-27-3.

• Henry Harris in the Oxford Brookes Medical Video Archive
• History of the William Dunn School of Pathology in Oxford
• Henry Harris archive collection – Wellcome Library finding aid

• 1925 births
• 2014 deaths
• Soviet emigrants to Australia
• Australian emigrants to the United Kingdom
• British biologists
• Jewish British scientists
• British medical researchers
• Fellows of Lincoln College, Oxford
• Fellows of the Royal Society
• Australian Knights Bachelor
• People educated at Sydney Boys High School
• Royal Medal winners
• Regius Professors of Medicine (University of Oxford)
• Sydney Medical School alumni
• University of Sydney alumni
• Fellows of the Australian Academy of Science
• Alumni of Lincoln College, Oxford
• Scientists from Sydney
• British people of Russian-Jewish descent
• Australian people of Russian-Jewish descent

• Webarchive template wayback links
• All articles with bare URLs for citations
• Articles with bare URLs for citations from March 2022
• Articles with PDF format bare URLs for citations
• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Use British English from July 2017
• All Wikipedia articles written in British English
• Use dmy dates from July 2017
• Articles needing additional references from May 2017
• All articles needing additional references
• Articles with hCards
• All articles with unsourced statements
• Articles with unsourced statements from February 2014